I was shopping with a friend. We were on the 2nd floor of a building that had an escalator that came up from the street. I could hear commotion going on down on the street so I raced down the escalator to see if I could help. When I got to the street, my vision changed. Every thing was sharper, brighter and all of the objects were glowing. The person laying on the ground was me.

I had apparently died suddenly. Once I realized I was dead, I wanted to go back up to the 2nd floor and say goodbye to my friend. My friend was gone, but I found myself on the other side of the building walking down the street with my father. He died in 1976. I said to my father: "This life was a disappointment". At that point, I could feel pain in my shoulders. (I'm disabled from Thoracic Outlet syndrome) I awoke to find that I was still alive.

It was strange because the feeling of being dead, then waking again almost felt like what many claim to be near death experiences. All could think about today is how this incarnated life has been disappointing. (And was I returned to make good of what's left of my life?)

It was just a dream. You weren't dying or anything. Remember, you had been sleeping all along. You were bound to wake up at some point so you weren't "returned".

You can, however, take advantage of the insight that this experience has given you, Ebanezer!

Thanks for sharing. B-)

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"Empty cognizance of one taste, suffused with knowing, is your unmistaken nature, the uncontrived original state. when not altering what is, allow it to be as it is, and the awakened state is right now spontaneously present."

Consider this. Many people die in their sleep. It's common. I wonder what they dream about before THEY die? I agree, I'm sure it was all just a dream. Then again, the mind doesn't know the difference between a dream and real memory. It makes you think about what you've done with your life so far.

In such scenario, I'd imagine the brain's natural psychedelics and opiates would have kicked in, making the dying person feel an all-pervading sense of peace and hallucinate a pseudo-afterlife where deceased loved ones or religious figures are encountered (depending on the individual's background and beliefs). All this would cushion the dying person before he or she is ushered out into permanent unconsciousness.

[ Post made via Android ]

"Empty cognizance of one taste, suffused with knowing, is your unmistaken nature, the uncontrived original state. when not altering what is, allow it to be as it is, and the awakened state is right now spontaneously present."

Why do you assume death means permanent unconsciousness? I believe death is a transition to a higher level of consciousness. Once we shed these meat jackets, our vibrational existence, or electro magnetic imprint, will not be impaired by the physical body. I'm not saying either one of us is right or wrong, but if manifestation plays a role, I'm not going with the "expiration" principle. In nature, when many things die, they actually become something bigger and more important. Like the Acorn or the caterpillar.

Perhaps the String theory of quantum physics is where the answer lays.

The evidence from neuroscience speaks for itself. Everything about the mind, every mental faculty, is liable to expunction via critical damage or malfunction of brain parts. The fact that we can be rendered unconscious even in our living condition (and brain activity can reflect that) speaks volumes about a dead or utterly destroyed brain. How can we expect, then, the dead to be conscious?

This is why I cannot acquiesce to your reasoning or preference. Another reason is evolution. The fact that consciousness evolved from unconsciousness. The fact that evidence suggests we are more with it and more aware than, say, our Australopithecus ancestors ever were. Also, the fact that an adult human being is more conscious than a little baby. Or the fact that I've got no memories of ever existing prior to my birth.

There are also a few fallacies in your statement above. First, manifestation is the product of evolution, a long process of gradual change by natural selection (emphasis on "natural" so that "selection" is not seen as a misnomer or implying intelligent design debacle).

Secondly, in nature, when things die, they cease to function permanently. The acorn or the caterpillar are terrible analogies here because they deal more with transformation than death. It is more about progression than termination. There is evidence of continuation in the cycle of an insect's life - from egg, to larva, to being an adult creature (just as a human goes from infancy, to adolescence, to adulthood), but, insofar as regeneration and replacement of cells go, there is no real death of the organism until what we can scientifically ascertain to be final.

When a butterfly dies, nothing comes after that. Same as a human. There is nothing to be seen functioning and certainly nothing to evolve or change in any way. Apart from the emotional significance that the dead can play on our minds, they become, in reality, obsolete and thus naturally insignificant.

String theory is merely an idea, which, even if true, will not advocate the supernatural or prove that there is any kind of afterlife. And quantum theory, however weird, has been used to make predictions and has technologically revolutionised our world. If not for it, the transistor would not have been invented. Quantum mechanics is still merely currently and partly misunderstood, but it certainly does not warrant anything beyond the physical world, it just impacts reality in an unobvious way at first glance.

"Empty cognizance of one taste, suffused with knowing, is your unmistaken nature, the uncontrived original state. when not altering what is, allow it to be as it is, and the awakened state is right now spontaneously present."

Here Heinrich; another viewpoint to think about perhaps more in keeping with what appears to be your own feelings on the subject. This was written by a scientist. I don't agree with all he has to say; but alternate perspectives are important. :

"In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings. My concern here is with the bigger picture.

I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science. But I am more and more convinced that that the spirit of free inquiry is being repressed within the scientific community by fear-based conformity. Institutional science is being crippled by dogmas and taboos. Increasingly expensive research is yielding diminishing returns.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth. They believe that science has already solved the fundamental questions. The details still need working out, but in principle the answers are known.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system. But the "scientific worldview," based on the materialist philosophy, is enormously prestigious because science has been so successful. Its achievements touch all our lives through technologies like computers, jet planes, cell phones, the Internet and modern medicine. Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of scientific knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Science has been successful because it has been open to new discoveries. By contrast, committed materialists have made science into a kind of religion. They believe that there is no reality but material or physical reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Nature is mechanical. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These materialist beliefs are often taken for granted by scientists, not because they have thought about them critically, but because they haven't. To deviate from them is heresy, and heresy harms careers.

Since the 19th century, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, nature is purposeless, and minds are nothing but brain activity. Believers are sustained by the implicit faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance "promissory materialism" because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Many promises have been issued, but few redeemed. Materialism is now facing a credibility crunch unimaginable in the 20th century.

As I show in my new book, "Science Set Free," unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Many scientists prefer to think that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.

Despite the confident claim in the late 20th century that genes and molecular biology would soon explain the nature of life, the problems of biological development remain unsolved. No one knows how plants and animals develop from fertilized eggs. Many details have been discovered, hundreds of genomes have been sequenced, but there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The technical triumph of the Human Genome Project led to big surprises. There are far fewer human genes than anticipated, a mere 23,000 instead of 100,000. Sea urchins have about 26,000 and rice plants 38,000. Attempts to predict characteristics such as height have shown that genes account for only about 5 percent of the variation from person to person, instead of the 80 percent expected. Unbounded confidence has given way to the "missing heritability problem." Meanwhile, investors in genomics and biotechnology have lost many billions of dollars. A recent report by the Harvard Business School on the biotechnology industry revealed that "only a tiny fraction of companies had ever made a profit" and showed how promises of breakthroughs have failed over and over again.

Despite the brilliant technical achievements of neuroscience, like brain scanning, there is still no proof that consciousness is merely brain activity. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem." It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In physics, too, the problems are multiplying. Since the beginning of the 21st century, it has become apparent that known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of "dark matter" and "dark energy." The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure.

Contemporary theoretical physics is dominated by superstring and M theories, with 10 and 11 dimensions respectively, which remain untestable. The multiverse theory, which asserts that there are trillions of universes besides our own, is popular among cosmologists in the absence of any experimental evidence. These are interesting speculations, but they are not hard science. They are a shaky foundation for the materialist claim that everything can be explained in terms of physics.

Good science, like good religion, is a journey of discovery, a quest. It builds on traditions from the past. But it is most effective when it recognizes how much we do not know, when it is not arrogant but humble.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a biologist and author of Science Set Free. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, where he was Director of Studies in cell biology. "

The key to creativity is to remove the watchers from the gates, and realize how free you really are.

I just wanted to add to the argument against the notion that dead people somehow become "bigger" or more "important". When a body dies a process of decay begins followed by rigor mortis. Eventually it turns to inanimate dust. How that is bigger or more important than a living person I don't know.

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"Empty cognizance of one taste, suffused with knowing, is your unmistaken nature, the uncontrived original state. when not altering what is, allow it to be as it is, and the awakened state is right now spontaneously present."